Monday, January 16, 2017

Prometheus (re)Bound; Prologue

If you have not seen Ridley Scott's Prometheus, what follows won't make a whole lot of sense, and even if you have this may be a head scratcher. This Introduction will help explain the why-for of it. The what-of-it is fanfiction. In 2012, after seeing Scott's film I decided to gently rewrite the screenplay; to bolster what I felt was the movie's greatest strength: the 'Cosmicism' of Weyland and David. The artist, and hardcore Alien and H.P. Lovecraft fan, William Powhida corresponded with me a great deal while I worked on this, and helped to give what follows a Cthulhu pedigree, but also supplied a number of suggestions to help make the story fit squarely within the original Alien cannon.

What follows is just a reworking of the film's opening. Rather than drop the entire screenplay - as I did the first time around, I'll serialize it, posting scenes as I rework them.

Spoiler Alert: What follows is a word for word reworking script of the film's dialog and stage direction. What remains of the original is in black, my changes are in red. [The illustrator PJ McQuade, whose Prometheus fan art project inspired me to tackle this rewrite, originally illustrated the revised opening sequence. This time around, I am using images harvested from the web, most of which were taken from Terrence Malick films.]

[UPDATE: Since being prodded on Twitter by Tm Maughan this opening has rubbed me wronge. The whole point of this project is to fix what I thought was broken with the original movie. I found Scott's alien ubermench racist. In my original rewrite I changed the albino body builder at the opening to a huddle of pale wasted figures, and when it came time to lay out the images, I chose images from the film as best I could to downplay the idealism of the original. But as Tim's tweet made plane, it was insufficient. I had left Scott's most egregious error intact. At the suggestion of Bill Powhida I chose Mathew Barney images to replace the "Van Daniken crap" - its a little abstract, but I think it works.]

FAQ: Sith

The Sith are the bad guys in Star Wars. Darth Vader and the Emperor are Sith Lords. They are the Yin or “dark side” to the Jedi Yang.

What does the term Sith mean as it is used on this blog?

Beyond their place in the fictional universe of Star Wars, the Sith are a narrative element of a film made by a particular group of people in a particular time and place. Therefore the Sith have a very real social and political context. And it is this very real world idea that I am referring to in this blog:

Lucas and his crew were young Americans working together at the end of the Vietnam War and in the shadow of Watergate. In the parlance of that era’s youth, the Sith are “The Man.” They stand in for the corrupt authorities of the day as seen by the young people of the day. Lucas describes them as “Nixonian gangsters.”

And like Nixon, the Sith perfectly represent a particular strain of American authority: Cold Warriors. Not just the violence and paranoia of America’s anti-communist foreign policy, but their repressive and absolutist domestic policies: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”

Even the world building efforts of the cold warriors were perfectly embodied by Lucas and his crew. The top-down Utopian art, architecture and urbanism of the Cold Warriors were elegantly re-imaged as the Deathstar.

The Sith are characterized by the same traits that identify the Cold Warriors: they want control; they use a fear of chaos to squash any and all dissent. Their solutions are over simplified and deny the importance of disorder and spontaneity.

FAQ: Jedi

Just as the Sith have a real world context (see above FAQ) so do the Jedi. But just because I believe the Sith were inspired Cold Warrior anti-communists and Modernists, I do not mean to say that the Jedi were Post-Modernists and communists.